This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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Now, in the New Testament, the number for the Church remains twelve as Jesus calls twelve Apostles to be trained by Him to carry out the ministry following His ascension.
So, we pray. Not just in times of need, but we pray at all times. Because this is part of what it means to be saved.
We worry about the fact our days are as grass – so we try to scratch out a place for ourselves, to make a permanent, lasting place, to climb to higher places and succeed, more often than not, only to hurt each other in the process.
The point Luther made, again and again, was that distance between God and sinners is collapsed when the crucified Christ himself comes to sinners through a preacher.
Darkness is not your only friend. Jesus loves you, and he will be with you.
There were no discussions, no committee meetings, no master planning, he and his group simply went to Macedonia.
What you are doing for your hearers is sparking their imagination to live in, to dwell in, the images you are conjuring in their mind’s eye.
Jesus opens for us a way to walk through suffering and to sing our song of salvation as we talk to our heavenly Father.
God’s gifts, in turn, conform our minds to the mind of Christ, and catechize our imagination in the image of God’s Son.
Both Paul and Martin Luther were Olympic champions when it came to ladder climbing.
God excludes our boasting out of his abundant mercy.
I wanted the devotions of this book to be a source of strength for everyone who has waited all night to see the sun come up again.